Picasso. Blue and Rose

The Musée d’Orsay and the Musée national Picasso-Paris are organising an exceptional event dedicated to Pablo Picasso’s blue and rose periods. This exhibition is the first large-scale collaboration between our two museums, allowing us to bring together a number of previously unseen works. It features masterpieces, some of which, such as La Vie (1903, Cleveland Museum of Art), are being presented for the first time in France, and proposes a new interpretation on the years 1900-1906, a critical period in the artist’s career which to date has not been covered in its entirety by a French museum.

The presentation of this exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay demonstrates the desire to analyse the young Picasso within the framework of his era. His different productions have thus been placed within the context of the work of his contemporaries and predecessors, both Spanish and French (Casas, Nonell, Casagemas, Steinlen, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin), who he was able to directly observe at salons and galleries, and indirectly through reproduction, among other things.

The exhibition will bring together a large number of paintings and drawings with the aim of presenting a comprehensive overview of the artist’s sculptures and engravings between 1900 and 1906.